"An Offering to the PHP Gods"
Alexandra Samuel just coined a new word, bloggespondence, for the back and forth conversation we've been having about social bookmarking from our respective blogs. She even has an on-demand lexicon scribe named Rob who captures her new words, phrases, and acroynms, including YASBoS (Yet another social bookmarking service). That's the term she gave JOTS in her response after reading my response to her answer to my initial question in the comments of this post. (Follow the links backward from the period in that last sentence ...)
She gives a quick review to JOTS and says that any new entries in the social bookmarking arena or YASBoS need to offer something fastly superior to del.icio.us other than a "pretty face." Well, good interface design helps "geeks-have-nots" more easily use these tools. (People who are on the other side of the digital divide in terms of technical skill and access to using computers regularly and are confused and turned off by uber-geek interfaces like del.icio.us). The holy grail for me (someone who works with nonprofits) would be a well designed interface for del.icio.us.
But more than style, del.icio.us needs more nonprofit substance. I've introduced del.icio.us to some nonprofit staff people who are struggling with information overload and managing personal collections of web-based resources they need to do their work. Sometimes these folks also need a method to share their bookmarks with other staff members in the organization or at remote sites. They get excited about the possibility of a web-based bookmark and whole concept of tagging and folksonomies.
However, when it is time to show the social bookmarking aspect, usually their bookmarks (most non-technical topics) have not been booked by other del.icio.us users. To illustrate social bookmarking, you have to use a technology-related tag ... and this can be less movitating. In fact, it reinforces the perception that it's just a geeky tool for early adopters. So, I create tip sheets like "del.icio.us interface cheat sheet" and encourage people to tell their colleagues at other organizations to try del.icio.us.
Maybe we just wait a few more months .....
Alexandra also predicts that with the growing entries of del.icio.us me-toos, that site-independent taggregation (like the technorati tag?) will become even more important. She ends invoking the PHP gods.
I have a couple of questions for Alexandra:
- What's your take on "site-independent taggregation" services arena?
- You described JOTS urls-to-tags ratio as impressive (2:1). Why is it impressive? How does it compare to del.icio.us?
How funny! I just commented on a post of hers and linked to it last week. Nice to see that it's still a small world, Beth.
Posted by: Ed | June 13, 2005 at 11:52 PM